Category: Common Core, Public School System & Dumbing Down Of Society

The dog days of August will soon be upon us, and with them, millions of happy, skipping, playing children will soon be off to their local Amairukuhn public edgykayshun screwl where they will listen attentively to their teachers facilitators who will teach facilitate the transfer of information and critical thinking ability osmotic absorption of sensitivity and higher consciousness and politically correct attitudes, and learn how to spell and read use learn how to invent gender neutral pronouns as they spell correctly and use proper English grammar and diction fill their text messages with endless abbreviations thus facilitating faster communication obfuscating and ruining any chance of real communication. Then Pavlov’s bell will ring, the children will salivate, and run out to swing and play and talk with each other bury their faces in their ipads, conduct no social interaction with each other, sit on picnic table benches, swill corn syrup from soda, and grow fat, stupid, lazy, and own their own butthurt safe spaces.

Yes, that’s right: we’re going to have another edgykayshun rant, and if you think that things cannot possibly be as bad as all this, think again. As Gary Lawrence and I pointed out in our book Rotten to the (Common) Core, the Amairikuhn screwl – to borrow radio commentator Rush Limbaugh’s apt term for it – is nothing but a big social engineering experiment, from kindergarten all the way to graduate quackademia. But wait, there’s more! Ms. C.V. found this article and sent it along:

Yes, if you have white skin, you’re the problem. Now, I don’t know about you, but back in the day, this would be called racism. Get this:

The “Reimagining Education Summer Institute” conference, organized by Columbia University’s Teachers College, was held in mid-July and concentrated on “opportunities and challenges of creating and sustaining racially, ethnically and socio-economically integrated schools,” according to its website.

The event, in its second year, drew 300 participants that mostly consisted of K-12 teachers and principals, the institute’s director Amy Wells said in a phone interview with The College Fix. The four-day conference included plenary sessions, dozens of workshops and dialogue sessions.

One presentation, called “Whiteness in schools,” provided “a history of Whiteness, and will invite participants into a discussion of how Whiteness and White culture shapes what happens in schools,” according to a description.

One workshop discussed “3 ways to face white privilege in the classroom.” Presented by Teachers College postdoctoral fellow Jamila Lyiscott, a summary of the workshop states it included “activities and critical dialogue around White privilege to connect personal responsibility to pedagogical possibilities for the classroom.”

And a workshop on “Teaching for Social Justice” sought to challenge colonialist and racist pedagogies.

“We will challenge Eurocentric pedagogical approaches that not only under-prepare students for the realities of our increasingly multiethnic, multilingual, globalized society, but are also rooted in colonial and racist ideologies that stifle the voices, identities, and realities of students of color,” a description states.

Yes, whiteness, race, is the problem. Uh huh. And if you believe that, I have several bridges in Manhattan for sale… cheap. (Cash only, no bitcoins, or credit or debit cards.)

This is nothing new, for as we pointed out in Rotten to the (Common) Core, the Progressive Education Association, a “brainchild” of the busybody John Dewey, published a study in December of 1943, where we read the following commissarial ukase:

“This is a global war… we are writing now the credo by which our children must live (for those of you who remember English grammar, note the imperative mood).

They were drawing up, by their own admission (cue trumpet fanfare), “a blueprint for the children of the world.”(pp. 82-83).

Thus it has nothing to do with whiteness; this is the handy dandy “racism” card that has been and is being played to wage a cultural war rather on the foundations of Western Civilization, of which, as I have stated before, there are three fundamental bases: (1) Judaism, and the idea of covenant or contract, and hence, equality before the law and a universal rule of law (2) Christianity, and the doctrine of the incarnation, which implies a sacredness to human work, and to intellectual and emotional life (that pretty well encompasses the arts and sciences), and (3) the humanistic impulse, coming from the Renaissance and Enlightenment, which created the enormous impetus for critical thought, scholarship, the study of the craft and tradition of artistic and scientific creativity and discipline. Yes, we call them “academic disciplines” because it took discipline, dedication, and responsibility to study and master them, whether one was studying painting or physics, music or mathematics.

But wait, there is still more:

There was also a “Deconstructing Racial Microaggressions” workshop in which attendees pledged to address racial insults at their schools.

Institute director Wells, a professor of sociology and education at the Teachers College, said the conference came about out of her belief that the “missing piece” regarding issues of integration in education is what goes on inside the classroom.

“It’s always about getting kids into the building and I just think … we’re always missing the educators who actually do the work and who actually interact with the kids on daily basis and help them understand race in terms of how they’re relating to other students,” she said.

And of course, the problem here is that when edgykayshun becomes social engineering in pursuit of eradicating “microagressions,” there will be no end of the process, and the edugarchy – as Mr. Lawrence and I called the edgykayshunal oligarchy – is permanently empowered to subject teachers and students to its own aggressions, which are hardly of a “micro” nature, but rather of a marco nature. After all, it’s a war on western culture. The result, the goal, of all of this, of teacher certification and the colleges of “edgykayshun,” was to make teachers not the ministers of a tradition, but rather to turn them into “change agents”, the sergeants in the field of social engineering, carrying out the orders of the generals in the edgykayshun colleges for social engineering. THe teaching certificate is nothing but a “license to practice” a particular kind of social engineering.

So here’s a thought: Why not simply teach language and letters, and thereby create that common cultural matrix that all can participate in, and thereby eradicate the divisiveness championed by our edugarchs? Consider this op-ed piece shared by many people this past week, and written by a former teacher, Ms. Linda Shrock Taylor:

Ms. Taylor is correct: the heart of the problem is a system where regulators enforce their stunted vision of the world through “teaching colleges” and the whole implied process of certification, backing up by a federal goobernment that is completely out of control and in the hands of some of the most corrupt, psychopathic and narcissistic twits in history, who pander, not to education, but to the corporations peddling academic quackery, and the “education” departments that long ago declared their cultural treason.

Understand what this means; it means increasingly that those of you with children will have to be like the mother in Ms. Taylor’s article; you’ll have to take up the mantle of education of your children yourself, and in defiance of the “cultural values” of racism, bigotry, and divisiveness and “microagressions” being championed by the edugrachy. They will not do it. They sold out decades ago. Understand that the progressive movement long ago targeted education for infiltration and co-option, to use it as a means of creating their “blueprint for the children of the world” and writing the “credo by which they must live.”

We see the result. Their “credo” is an absolute disaster, socially, culturally, and most importantly, in terms of the generations of idiots it has churned out.

About Dr. Joseph P. Farrell

Joseph P. Farrell has a doctorate in patristics from the University of Oxford, and pursues research in physics, alternative history and science, and “strange stuff”. His book The Giza DeathStar, for which the Giza Community is named, was published in the spring of 2002, and was his first venture into “alternative history and science”.

Let’s start here. In 2016, as US News reports, “The Portland Public Schools Board on Tuesday decided to ban any classroom materials that cast doubt on climate change. The resolution passed unanimously and requires that textbooks and other material purchased by the district present climate change as a fact rather than theory. Material will also need to present human activity as one of the phenomenon’s causes.”

This is good news. Why? Because a school system has asserted how it wants education to be managed. This is how children will be taught. No tap-dancing around the issue. Here it is. Boom. Out in the open. If you don’t like it, too bad.

If you don’t like it as a parent, take your child out of the Portland system. Launch home schooling. Start your own private school. Move out of Portland to another public school district.

Let’s go all the way back to the beginning of the American public-education system and Thomas Jefferson, who tried (and failed) to get a bill passed in the Virginia legislature. Jefferson:

“But if it is believed that these elementary schools will be better managed by…[any] general authority of the government, than by the parents within each ward, it is a belief against all experience.…No, my friend, the way to have good and safe government, is not to trust it all to one, but to divide it among the many, distributing to every one exactly the functions he is competent to.”

Jefferson’s vision was hundreds of small wards within each state. Each ward would have its own public school, and the parents—not the government—would manage it and fund it.

If, in one school, the parents decide children will learn the moon is a painted illusion on the sky, so be it. If they decide that stones can speak or logic is a European plot against human reason, so be it. If they decide to assemble a list of a thousand banned books, which must be burned, so be it.

With this sort of vast decentralization, it wouldn’t be long before disgruntled parents within a ward would break away and start their own school.

The opposite system is federal. Federal mandates, funding, programs, curriculum.

Education run by the individual states is hardly better. These governments are also huge and demanding.

I don’t care what excuses parents come up with, in order to opt out of taking charge of education. It’s their burden, whether through home-schooling, by creating and sustaining their own private schools for their children, or deciding which schools to send their kids to. The responsibility is theirs.

The usual caterwaul goes this way: “But many, many parents aren’t equipped to understand what goes on in the classroom. We need government-run schools to make sure children receive a good education.”

Baloney. Since when is it necessary to design an entire school system around the ignorance of parents?

Why not say most parents don’t know how to raise their children, and therefore the state must take over that function, too?

Well, if you took a few hours to research the work of Child Protective Services bureaucracies around the US, you’d realize this is, in fact happening. The brutal overreach of these agencies, in many cases, amounts to kidnapping. On false pretexts, the State takes children and dumps them into foster care, where violent abuse and high-dose drugging with toxic psychiatric meds is endemic.

Face it, the government loves parents who say they don’t understand education, medical treatment, child-rearing—whatever responsibility parents are willing to abdicate, it’s a cause for celebration in government circles.

The State promotes a consensus of cluelessness and victimhood.

If I were a top federal bureaucrat, I’d sponsor a program (a few billion dollars ought to cover it) to investigate and discover the most ignorant set of parents in America, the mother and father who can’t think their way out of a wet paper bag. I would profile those parents from head to toe, and based on the information gleaned, I would then form 1000 federal programs (adequately staffed) to assume all the child-rearing functions those parents can’t perform AND IMPOSE THOSE FUNCTIONS ON ALL FAMILIES AND CHILDREN IN AMERICA.

“It takes a village.” And this is the kind of village we’re really talking about. Not some African tribal outpost. A federal ghetto.

So good work, Portland, in banning all books that question climate change. My only problem is you haven’t gone far enough. You should have daily chanting sessions for all the children: CLIMATE CHANGE IS REAL, CLIMATE CHANGE IS REAL, intoned for a half-hour after lunch. Perhaps you can attach electrodes to the children’s heads and produce readouts of secretly dissenting young minds in the classroom, and shunt those kids off to a Chinese-style re-education facility and call it “enrichment.”

Then, perhaps, more parents in your district would wake up and grab their kids and run for the hills and start their own schools, because they can’t deny what you’re doing any longer.

The author of three explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED, EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, and POWER OUTSIDE THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free NoMoreFakeNews emails here or his free OutsideTheRealityMachine emails here.

Whenever you let federal bureaucrats get their hands on anything they are probably going to ruin it. During the Obama administration, the Department of Education spearheaded a transformation of American education that was absolutely breathtaking. Over a period of about five years, Common Core standards were implemented in almost every state in the entire nation. Unfortunately, this has resulted in a huge step backward for public education in this country. Common Core has been called “state-sponsored child abuse”, and it is a big reason why U.S. students are scoring so poorly on standardized tests compared to much of the rest of the world.

According to Wikipedia, at one point 46 states had adopted Common Core, but now some states are having second thoughts…

46 states initially adopted the Common Core State Standards, although implementation has not been uniform. At least 12 states have introduced legislation to repeal the standards outright,[1] and Indiana has since withdrawn from the standards.

Organized in seven chapters, her book describes how the Gates Foundation promoted and continues to promote one extremely wealthy couple’s uninformed, unsupported, and unsupportable ideas on education for other people’s children while their own children are enrolled in a non-Common Cored private school. It explains how (but not exactly why) the Gates Foundation helped to centralize control of public education in the U.S. Department of Education. It also explains why parents, teachers, local school boards, and state legislators were the last to learn how the public schools their local and state taxes supported had been nationalized without Congressional knowledge or permission; and why they were expected to believe that their local public schools were now accountable for what and how they teach … not to the local and state taxpayers who fund them or to locally-elected school boards that by law are still supposed to set education policies not already determined by their state legislature … but to a distant bureaucracy in exchange for money to their state department of education to close “achievement gaps” between unspecified groups.

But this isn’t just an issue about control. The truth is that the approach to teaching basic fundamentals such as how to add and how to subtract is fundamentally different under Common Core.

Let me share just three examples that show how much Common Core is changing the way that U.S. students learn math. All of these examples have been floating around Facebook, and if you have never seen these before they are likely to make you quite angry.

If I asked you to subtract 12 from 32, how would you do it? Well, the “new way” is much, much more complicated than how we were all taught to do it…

If that first one seemed bizarre to you, than you really aren’t going to like this one…

And this last one was so confusing that a parent with a degree in engineering decided to include his own commentary on his child’s homework…

How are kids supposed to function in the real world if this is how they are learning to do basic math?

Personally, I am going to teach my daughter that 9 + 6 equals 15. But that isn’t how it is supposed to be done under Common Core. You can watch a video of a teacher explaining the very convoluted Common Core way to solve that math equation right here.

And of course it isn’t just math that is the problem. Common Core is systematically “dumbing down” our young people, and that may help to explain why the average U.S. college freshman now reads at a seventh grade level.

Since their inception, the Idaho Core Standards have been enmeshed in controversy.

Some legislators and citizens have pushed for a repeal of the Idaho Core Standards, the state’s version of Common Core standards in math and English language arts. Those repeal efforts have gone nowhere in the Legislature.

I don’t know what is wrong with our legislators. The Republicans have full control in this state, and so there is absolutely no excuse for not getting something done.

As I end this article, I want to give you an idea of just how far the quality of education in America has fallen over the past 100 years. In Kentucky, an eighth grade exam from 1912 made a lot of headlines when it was donated to the Bullitt County History Museum. As you can see, it is doubtful whether many of our college students would be able to pass such an exam today…

Cultural Literacy by E.D. Hirsch is a sobering look into some of the reasons why public schooling in America has been spiraling downwards for the last few decades. At the vanguard of these issues, Hirsch narrows down this intellectual death spiral to the loss of cultural literacy among the masses. This loss of cultural literacy has exacerbated the significant bifurcation between the individuals that have literate cultural backgrounds, and those that do not.

Moreover, Hirsch makes it a point to show that cultural literacy is not just knowing about significant facts, or information as some would undoubtedly think. Certainly, these are at times important, but more precisely, the author homes-in on the fact that cultural literacy is information shared by individuals within a particular social strata that makes their communications more efficient and enjoyable, thus allowing for a more cohesive social strata.

With a critical eye, Hirsch notes:

“….literacy requires the early and continued transmission of specific information…Only by accumulating shared symbols, and the shared information that the symbols represent, can we learn to communicate effectively with one another in our national community.”[1]

Employing copious amounts of research, Hirsch shows there should be a significant cause for concern about the poor quality of education, as well as other salient problems.

With deep concern, Hirsch soberingly warns:

“If we not achieve a literate society, the technicians, with their arcane specialties, will not be able to communicate with us nor we with them. That would contradict the basic principles of democracy and must not be allowed to happen.”[2]

A sound and versatile education is impossible without a robust culturally literate repertoire. This is why the information touched upon by Hirsch is so pivotal and should be ruminated upon.To home in on the point of deteriorating education, let’s take a gander at what two-time award winning teacher, researcher and writer, John Taylor Gatto stated in A Different Kind Of Teacher:

““Schools were designed by Horace Mann, E.L. Thorndike, and others to be instruments of scientific management of a mass population. Schools are intended to produce, through the application of formulas, formulaic beings whose behavior can be predicted and controlled. To a very great extent, schools succeed in doing this.”[3][Bold Emphasis Added]

Lowering cultural literacy, among other things, would undoubtedly be part of this process. This is because culturally literate individuals will be familiar with the scaffolding of history and many of its nuances; such individuals are magnitudes harder to control, which is why public schooling through the Common Core system seeks to conform everyone through standardized testing and more. (For more information, please look below the sources at the resources and suggested reading.)

We are at a turning point in history, and we either stop the descent into cultural nescience, individually, and as a nation, or we continue into the swamp of ignorance.

Irrespective of the circumstances, one thing is certain: there is still time to make significant changes if individuals choose to. It is really up to individuals and their families to educate themselves, because the way the system is constructed, a well-rounded and complete education cannot take place within the system. This is one of many reasons why self-teaching is growing at an immense rate, and will continue to do so. Don’t allow yourself, or those you know to fall by the wayside merely because the system is corrupt and cares not for true education but rather to instead create cogs for the machine.

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___________________________________________________________About The Author:

Zy Marquiez is an avid book reviewer, inquirer, an open-minded skeptic, yogi, and freelance writer who aims at empowering individuals while also studying and regularly mirroring subjects like Consciousness, Education, Creativity, The Individual, Ancient History & Ancient Civilizations, Forbidden Archaeology, Big Pharma, Alternative Health, Space, Geoengineering, Social Engineering, Propaganda, and much more.

His other blog, BreakawayConsciousnessBlog.wordpress.com features mainly his personal work, while TheBreakaway.wordpress.com serves as a media portal which mirrors vital information nigh always ignored by mainstream press, but still highly crucial to our individual understanding of various facets of the world.

We’ve spent a fair amount of time over the past several years writing about the ‘participation trophy generation’ (a.k.a. “millennials) and, more specifically, how their inflated sense of entitlement and self-worth, irrespective of work effort and/or innate talent, would not serve them well in the real world.

You see millennials, despite what your enabling handlers (a.k.a. “educators”) have told you your whole life, people here in the real world couldn’t care any less about your feelings, think your ‘Gender Studies’ degree was a complete waste of your parents’ money, will not promote you just because anything less would be a ‘triggering’ event and do not recognize your standing to demand ‘safe spaces’.

In fact, taking a moment to truly internalize the following quote from our favorite movie would serve you well.

“Listen up maggots. You are not special. You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake. You’re the same decaying organic matter as everything else. We are the all singing, all dancing crap of the world. We are all part of the same compost heap.”

And, while we’ve been forced to write post after post detailing the lunacy of your behavior as you frolic aimlessly on the campuses of liberal bastions of higher indoctrination across this great country, growing more and more sickened with each new display of entitlement, we have to say that your efforts to eliminate high school rankings is a new low, even for you.

Unfortunately, as the AP points out today, that is exactly what seems to be happening at high schools all around the country as the title of “valedictorian” is being eliminated and/or bestowed upon so many kids in each graduating class that it’s rendered meaningless.

“More and more schools are moving toward a more holistic process. They look deeper into the transcript,” Gottlieb said.

Wisconsin’s Elmbrook School District has for several years ranked only the valedictorian and salutatorian, and only then because the state awards scholarships to schools’ top two graduates, according to Assistant Superintendent Dana Monogue. The change has been accepted by colleges and community alike, Monogue said.

“We are encouraged by any movement that helps students understand that they’re more than a score, that they’re more than a rank,” she said.

One school in Tennessee awarded the “valedictorian” title to 48 kids, or roughly 25% of the entire graduating class.

Tennessee’s Rutherford County schools give the valedictorian title to every student who meets requirements that include a 4.0 grade-point average and at least 12 honors courses. Its highly ranked Central Magnet School had 48 valedictorians this year, about a quarter of its graduating class.

At another school in Maryland, the AP highlights the woes of a concerned mother who wonders how ranking might affect her teenager’s confidence.

The day rankings came out at Hammond High School in Columbia, Maryland, students were privately told their number — but things didn’t stay private for long.

“That was the only thing everyone was talking about,” said Mikey Peterson, 18, who shrugged off his bottom-third finish and will attend West Virginia University in the fall.

A spokesman for the Howard County, Maryland, district said schools recognize their top 5 percent so students can include it on college applications and hasn’t considered changing.

“There was a big emphasis on where you landed,” said Peterson’s classmate Vicki Howard, 18. “It made everything 10 times more competitive.”

Peterson’s mother, Elizabeth Goshorn, said she can’t walk into his school without hearing good things about her affable son, but worries about how rankings can affect a teenager’s confidence.

“It has such an impact on them as to how they perceive themselves if you’re putting rankings on them,” she said.

Try as you might, ignoring the principles of basic mathematics does not mean that they cease to exist. And while your enabling parents, high schools and colleges may share your view that ranking people on the basis achievement is racist, sexist and/or any other number of adjectives you may wish to throw out there….again, we assure you that the real world does not care.

Many once-fine institutions for higher learning in America are slowly but very steadily being transformed from educational facilities to cultural revolution centers aimed at destroying traditional American principles, values and mores.

How else can you possibly explain this outrage: Requiring political science majors to take and pass a course called “Abolition of Whiteness” that is little more than mandatory shaming of anyone born Caucasian.

As reported by Campus Reform, Hunter College in New York City, beginning in the Fall 2017 semester, will require the course, which is to be taught by “Women and Gender Studies” Prof. Jennifer Gaboury. The course is cross-listed for her department and the Political Science Department, and will fulfill one of four classes in the “4 subfields of political science” under the overarching “POLSC 204: Contemporary Issues in Political Theory.”

As Campus Reform notes, the school’s official course catalog doesn’t say very much about what the course actually discusses. However, a flyer advertising a previous version of the course from the Fall 2016 semester says it is “an overview of whiteness studies in the United States,” focusing specifically “on concepts of consciousness, in/visibility, disavowal, and resentment.”

So in other words, students are taught that not only are whites the epitome of all that is bad in America, they should feel badly about creating so much “resentment” for all they’ve allegedly done, and must disavow their own race.

It isn’t as though a degree in “Women and Gender Studies” is going to land you a decent job, but what is a course like this supposed to add, specifically, to someone’s understanding of government?

Nothing, of course. It’s not about that. It’s about meting out punishment for being white.

“We’ll be examining how whiteness — and/or white supremacy and violence — is intertwined with conceptions of gender, race, sexuality, class, body ability, nationality, and age,” says the course description. It adds, “a petition for this course is on file with the College Senate so that it fulfills Pluralism and Diversity Parts B, C, or D.,” which is a reference to mandatory course work that, respectively, focuses on “the historical conditions, perspectives and/or intellectual traditions” of ethnic minorities in the United States, women, people with non-traditional sexual orientations, as well as Europeans.

While the course does not yet appear to have been officially added to the list of classes which satisfy the “Pluralism and Diversity requirement,” the mere fact that it has been proposed and being seriously considered is worse than outrageous.

If there is any aspect of “Abolition of Whiteness” appropriate to the instruction of political science in this day and age, instruction which includes lessons in political activity and political behavior, which party — rather, which ideology — do you think gives the subject the most serious consideration?

If you said Donald Trump’s party, you’d be wrong. Trump isn’t the “white supremacist” he’s framed as being, his supporters aren’t the racists they’ve been portrayed as being. In fact, only the Alt-Left, which is squarely ensconced in the Democratic Party, pushes the narrative that whites are evil, whites are bad, and if only power were taken away from whites then America would become utopia. (Related: Read America’s Universities Have Become Training Camps For Violent Left-Wing Extremism.)

No course like this should be taught on any college campus, but can you even imagine such a course being suggested and approved called “Abolition of Blackness,” where students are taught to “disavow” and “resent” black people? Or Hispanics? Or Native Americans?